The Laws of Magic 6: Hour of Need (35 page)

‘He cannot hear you. None of them can.’

Aubrey’s nerves were so taut that when he spun on one foot he nearly fell off the base of the pillar.

Leaning against the base of the next column was Sylvia Tremaine, Dr Tremaine’s younger sister.

S
YLVIA
T
REMAINE WAS SO MUCH MORE ALIVE THAN
the last time Aubrey had encountered her, which, since she had been at death’s door, made reasonable sense. Her eyes were bright, her skin was tight and supple, her black hair lustrous, but it was the mobility of her face, the smooth confidence with which she leaned, arms crossed, against the marble, and even the canary yellow dress and gloves she wore that signalled that she was whole and integrated, far from the poor splinter of a soul that Aubrey had encountered inside the Tremaine Pearl. ‘I’m glad you finally appeared.’ She smothered a yawn. ‘It’s getting so boring here.’

‘Boring?’ Aubrey groped for the right response. They were in the middle of a war that had already cost the lives of thousands and displaced many more. Her brother was on the cusp of reaping the consciousness of a million or more in a stroke. While all of this was going on, Sylvia Tremaine was bored?

Without taking his eyes from her, Aubrey eased himself to the edge of the pillar base and dropped to the floor. ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked. It came out brusquely.

‘He’s back there somewhere, making his arrangements.’ She tossed her head, gesturing between the pillars. Aubrey risked a glance, but couldn’t see anything. A few paces away, greyness swallowed everything.

‘I see. You’re looking well.’

‘I am well. Thanks to you, Mordecai finally found a way to revive and restore me.’

‘Thanks to me?’

‘Something about your shattered soul, binding and a magical connection, if I remember correctly.’

Aubrey didn’t like the way she was looking at him. It reminded him too much of an animal with an eye on something small and tasty. ‘Unfortunately it interrupted his great work, but it couldn’t be helped.’

Aubrey realised that it was extremely difficult to look casual while holding a military rifle in both hands, but he summoned all the experience he had had on the stage to take the part of the juvenile lead – feckless and well-meaning in every way. He ambled, taking his time, doing his best to look aimless but working his way towards the central column of light. He gazed about the rotundity, giving his best shot at nonchalance. When he couldn’t see any of his friends he forced himself to be calm.
They’ve hidden themselves
, he thought.
They’re doing exactly what they should.
‘This doesn’t look like your brother’s work.’

Sylvia followed him and laughed. It echoed from the pillars and the dome overhead. ‘Mordecai has an erratic sense of the dramatic, I’m afraid. He didn’t think it important, for instance, to set the stage for the greatest feat of magic of all time.’

‘I see. This is
your
conception of an appropriate stage, then?’

‘Given what I had to work with, it’s good enough. The concentrating lens that you’re marching toward, for instance, is hard to fit into any sort of design. And that’s not to mention that awful fountain of light and the magician array.’

‘Magician array?’

She swept a hand around the great circle of pillars. ‘These magicians that Mordecai has gathered, harnessed in series or parallel or whatever it is. Essential though Mordecai says they are, they were the very devil to work into something harmonious. I’m rather glad of my solution.’

‘Every column holds a person.’

‘More or less. More or less a person, I mean.’

‘How many?’

‘One hundred and twenty-eight. It’s a number with some significance apparently. I’ll let Mordecai explain that when he gets here.’

‘Which will be soon?’

‘He has some things to complete. Until then, I have to stop you from spoiling things.’

‘Spoiling things? That rather depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s my point of view that counts, at the moment, because I have this.’

He jerked around. Sylvia held a pistol that she didn’t have a few moments ago. ‘I think I was supposed to shoot you with it as soon as you arrived.’

‘He was expecting me?’

‘Oh yes. He said you were near.’

Aubrey took out his juvenile lead smile. ‘You don’t want to shoot me.’

‘Yes I do. You’re trying to stop us becoming immortal.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’
Now would be a good time for Caroline to lunge at her
, he thought, making sure to keep Sylvia’s gaze locked on his.
Or George to knock her over. Or Sophie to hit her with something.

‘Now, that rather depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?’ She mocked him with a laugh, and Aubrey knew that he was in more trouble than he’d thought. He’d mistaken her chat for humanity and thought that he’d seen a chink of light there, but he’d been deluding himself. She was a Tremaine, as self-centred as her brother. ‘Stopping our plans is wrong, according to us. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Why haven’t you shot me, then?’

‘I’m bored, remember? I’ve been waiting for ages for Mordecai to finalise things. When I’m bored, I like things to play with.’

Aubrey had a brief moment of regret about his rifle not being loaded with conventional rounds, dismissed it, and began sizing up distances. How far could he run? How fast? To the columns or to the shaft of light? ‘I think I left a pack of cards just outside. Let me get them for you.’

‘Mordecai doesn’t like to gloat, you know.’ She paused, and tapped the barrel of the revolver against her cheek. ‘No, that’s not it. It’s not that he doesn’t like it, he just doesn’t see the point. Whereas I understand that gloating is fun. Grovelling can be quite diverting, you know.’

‘You want me to grovel while you gloat.’

‘If you would, I’d appreciate it.’ She pouted. ‘If you won’t, of course, I’ll shoot you.’

‘You do know that people who talk most about shooting do least of it, don’t you?’

‘Really? Oh, I do so like giving the lie to things.’

With that, from a distance of only twenty yards, Sylvia Tremaine shot him.

The dome echoed with the boom of the pistol. Sylvia stared at her firearm with dismay while Aubrey stared at his unmarked, unharmed self and heard a waft of hot aridity that could only be magic.

‘I hate it when I miss,’ Sylvia said, then she actually stamped her foot on the floor.

‘Don’t do that, Sylvia. It makes you look petulant.’

Aubrey had seen it before, but he was still impressed. It was as if the whole chamber, bigger than any arena, had suddenly become smaller when Mordecai Tremaine entered it, striding out from between two pillars.

Without thinking, Aubrey raised the rifle, sighted – and then it disappeared from his grip. He blinked and staggered a few steps, thrown off balance by the sudden lack of weight in his hands.

Dr Tremaine had the rifle. He grunted and brought it up to his face, to inspect.

Normally a sartorialist’s dream, the rogue sorcerer had no top coat, his sleeves were rolled up and his white shirt – smeared with grease and unidentifiable stains – was missing a collar and open at the neck. His trousers were held up with black braces. His boots were scuffed and stained.

He shook his head in either disappointment or disgust, then took the rifle by the muzzle. He swung it in a great circle at the full extent of his arm, then let go.

Aubrey gaped. The rifle sailed in a great arc, tumbling end over end, traversing the hundreds of feet to the column of light. It struck and disappeared, with only the tiniest flare to show its demise.

Dr Tremaine’s gaze fell on Aubrey. He pulled a greasy rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands. ‘Fitzwilliam. I felt you nearby.’

Aubrey straightened, touching his chest where the magical link had jumped at Dr Tremaine’s entrance. He shrugged, hiding his dismay at how easily Dr Tremaine had disposed of his careful plan. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss the show.’

Dr Tremaine finished with the rag and shoved it in the pocket of his trousers. He glanced at his sister with a combination of affection and exasperation. ‘There’d be no show if not for her. I would have just gone ahead.’

‘Ah, Mordecai.’ She linked arms with him. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Never miss a chance for a gesture that is both extravagant and grandiose!’

He snorted. ‘Whatever for? We’re the only ones here.’

‘If we don’t do it for ourselves, who else matters?’

Dr Tremaine gave that some thought, then shrugged. ‘Why haven’t you removed him?’

‘A moment’s entertainment,’ she said, ‘but now you’re here.’ She raised the pistol again. Aubrey shuffled to the left, then the right. ‘Stand still,’ she ordered.

‘I think not.’

‘Very well then. A moving target is the sort of challenge I enjoy.’

Aubrey was prepared to admit that beauty came in many forms. A well-proportioned building, for instance, was beautiful, as was the countryside on a spring day. A flower could be beautiful, if it were the right sort. Caroline Hepworth was undoubtedly beautiful, in any circumstances.

He’d never considered an act of mayhem beautiful, but when George Doyle swung down from the heights on the end of a silk rope, bowling both Sylvia and Dr Tremaine from their feet, it was beauty of such an exalted kind that he wanted to weep, or cheer, or both.

Sylvia was thrown up against the base of a pillar, her pistol spinning along the marble floor. She lay motionless. Dr Tremaine rolled and was on his feet in an instant, just in time to encounter a second act of beauty, one that transcended the first in the same way that an angel transcends the lowest pig in the sty.

George Doyle was ready for the rogue sorcerer. With every sinew and every muscle working perfectly, George delivered an uppercut that began somewhere around ankle level and accelerated until it struck Dr Tremaine on the point of the chin with enough force to lift the rogue sorcerer’s feet off the ground. His eyes rolled and he fell backward, toppling to the floor like a tree. He, too, didn’t move.

Aubrey had never seen Dr Tremaine even inconvenienced by their attempts to assault him but the unexpectedness and the perfection of George’s assault had slipped under his guard. Aubrey went to applaud. George grimaced and shoved his hand under his armpit. ‘What are you waiting for, old man? Do something magical!’

The booming of a shot made both Aubrey and George duck. Aubrey whirled to see Sylvia staring at her pistol again before Caroline sprang on her from behind the column. Caroline wrenched the pistol from Sylvia’s hand and flung her aside with a blinding shift of weight and a flurry of arms. ‘Hurry, Aubrey!’ she cried.

Hunching his shoulders, and calling himself craven for running away from helping his friends, he ran for the pillars. Another report echoed, from Caroline’s pistol this time as she spared a moment from grappling with Sylvia to snap off a shot. All Dr Tremaine did, as he shook his head and climbed to his feet after George’s magnificent blow, was to irritably slap the bullet out of the air. It struck the base of the nearby column hard enough to take a sizeable chunk out of it, but Dr Tremaine showed no signs of hurt.

So much for the magical projectile
, Aubrey thought.
It’s time for the other plan.

Aubrey liked to think he was no fool. For too long, he’d seen Dr Tremaine’s mode of operation. Plots within plots, parallel schemes running alongside fallback plans, feints masking important subsidiary operations, all the complex weavings of a master strategist. Along with these observations, he’d had the words of the Scholar Tan to guide him:
Plans are like birthdays. One is good, many is better.

Aubrey had learned.

While he’d had great hopes for his magical projectile, he’d been careful to have a number of alternative plans in case of failure. With the renewed vigour of the magical connection, one of his alternatives had leaped up and insisted on being used.

He dived, sliding on his stomach between two columns. He skidded a few feet past the bases and came up against a grey wall of nothingness.

Aubrey lifted his head, tilting it back and staring at the featureless barrier. His ordinary senses told him that it was smooth to the touch, almost slick. It had a sheen that shifted subtly. His magical senses told him that it was alive with unshaped magical potential.

He’d seen it before. It was the same material that underlay the refuge that had kept the unwell Sylvia Tremaine safe, the prison inside the Tremaine Pearl. This was the stuff Dr Tremaine bent to his will to create mazes, sanctuaries, and this impossible construction inside a battleship. It was magic, waiting to be shaped.

He shot to his feet. As much as he’d like to investigate this material further, he had more important work to do. If he wanted to help his friends, he had to do it quickly.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he did his best to convert the yell of fright into a battle cry. He did, however, seize the arm attached to the hand and wrench it around, but when he did so, he realised that Sophie must have been taking some lessons from Caroline, for with three quick movements, she jabbed him in the armpit, causing him to gasp with pain, twisted his elbow, causing him to loosen his grip, and bent his wrist, causing him to repeat his initial gasp with an extra layer of agony.

Sophie let go and put both hands to her mouth. ‘Oh, Aubrey.’ Her Gallian accent was stronger in her distress; Aubrey would normally have found it charming, but pain interfered with his appreciation.

‘Sophie,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I cast a spell,’ Sophie said. ‘We seem to be not where we are.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

She waved a hand, distressed, groping for the words. ‘Displaced. We are displaced. A few feet. They miss when they aim at us.’

‘Splendid.’ Aubrey now understood why Sylvia had failed to shoot him. ‘You have your pistol? Watch over me while I do some magic, will you?’

She smiled bravely. ‘I shall,’ she said, then her mouth formed a O and her eyes went wide. Immediately, she had her pistol in both hands and fired three shots in rapid succession, carefully bringing the revolver back into position after each round.